Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Right now, the subscription framework has no concept of multiple account ownership, despite the fact that it is nearly ubiquitous among serious players.

OP proposes that players shall be able consolidate all of their accounts and characters into a single account, and that the ability to simultaneously use and train them (multibox) be implemented as an add-on feature per character, ie. n PLEX per month to train and multibox n characters. Additionally, the implementation of a one-time fee to activate each additional character slot beyond the default of three.

This means:
1) CCP consolidates its customer database
2) Simplified account ownership for players
3. No more paying PLEX to shuffle our own characters between accounts
4) More proportional voting for CMS elections (one vote per player)
5) Pay-as-you go on a per-month basis based on how many characters you need to simultaneously train or use

It seems to be an eminently sensible suggestion.

Problem with this lies in the passive income characters. Such as PI alts & industry alts (Rather than the trader main who sells all the product). Who only need to log in for 5 minutes every few days, and a little longer once every couple of weeks.
Stack 10 of those on an account and CCP is taking a massive loss of income relative to now.

*snip* At least try to be productive to the topic. *snip* ~ISD Buldath

I'll be honest, it was an Idea i spun out in my head in half a minute. The reason was a thread about a new Bounty-Hunting System, and I am absolutely certain that a good Bounty Hunting expierience will vitalize this game. But there is one major flaw in this game that prevents it from happening: If someone places a juicy bounty on your head, what the **** would prevent you from claiming it on your own, with just one of you other characters? There is absolutely no way to ever get this dilemma solved - except one, and that is really a harsh one: Physically make it impossible to claim a bounty that is placed on one of your characters yourself.

The basic idea was this: Post Bounty-Jobs on a "Bounty-Wall", where players can then purchase a license to claim a bounty on an individual. 2 major flaws: Claim bounties on yourself, collect random scrub's ISK - and, place bounty on someone you want to gank, purchase license with alt, do the gank.

While it would be very easy to get rid of the latter with some game mechanics, the first part is absolutely impossible to achieve as long as you can log into another character and just kill your main with it. Or purchase the license on your main. Or, looking up whether or not there's a Bounty on your head with an alt and then tell buddies to go claim it. The only way would be to prevent a player completely from ever knowing there was a bounty on one of his characters up to the very moment someone else purchases the license. That can't be done with the current framework of the game.

That's what lit the spark for this idea, and i'll admit: For CCP, it'd be a ton of work to get basically nothing in return. There is 0 effect for them that enhances the game in any way to make it better marketable or attract more subscriptions or, or, or.
Then again, 3 Characterslots is pretty much a remnant from times of olde, namely, 2003 and earlier. It's no big deal, but not very cool either.
For the players, it'd be just some minor convenience update.
For the game, it could unlock gameplay scenarios that are currently unthinkable because of the easy exploitability of multiple accounts.

I don't even know why people would want to circumvent something like this, they'd be putting in effort to run a second account (or however) to have characters that are not on the same character selection screen as their other characters. Okay, maybe for account-sharing on some top level spy-characters, where it would get really fishy if the dude you trust your **** would suddenly see you have 73 other characters in the enemy alliance.

Yeah, but you can't for example go bounty hunting in highsec without getting konkordokkend, which puts you in the dilemma where you'll probably lose more ISK then you'd make.
The only thing bounties do right now is a means for alliance leadership to encourage your people to go **** other **** up, and that's about it. Current Bounty-System doesn't serve any purpose at all and isn't even a cool gimmick.

You could make it work in a way that it's very hard to abuse it to make ISK your own (or just remove the bounty on your own, not necessarily making ISK at it), but make it farily accessible for others. The key to this is to keep the player uninformed about the bounty until someone wants to claim it - which is only obtainable if you can control which characters are linked to other characters (Yours to yours) and thus exclude them from gaining information about bounties on themselves and claiming those bounties.
You'd need a friend to check for you, and there would be ways with gamemechanics to make this tedious as **** to abuse it defensively, but very easy if you're a dedicated bounty hunter.

Sure you can, you either need to war-dec the person in question's corp or get a kill-right on them, either by your own cleverness or by buying one.

Anything, if sufficiently rewarding, will be done by players even if it is tedious. They'll just complain about having to do it.

Seriously, there is no good way to prevent alts without causing more problems than you solve.

Yes, the bounty system is kind of bad right now, but what you're proposing is not a good solution, it's a bunch of pointless work for a *very* questionable benefit, all to make a niche mechanic *slightly* more usable.

This doesn't even get into the details of your system, like that some characters literally never undock and therefore could never be killed, or the other practical issues with timed bounty missions on other players.

The core of your complaint seems to be that it's not easy enough to collect a bounty on someone in high-sec, to which I can only reply "tough cookies, working as intended".

How do you prevent people from using multiple physical machines? We are at a stage where you can play on a phone.
Send photos of family member playing the game, signed by the police?

Every mmo I played it was beneficial to have multiple accounts, either as industry, scouting, spec'ing into different role just for fun (with limited toons/ account) or buffing (off-grid links, hello!).

To force 1-player per active character the game would have to be action packed like a shooter or an RTS, pressing F1 every 10 minutes or taking one minute to kill a rat for some pocket change allows players to manage 10+ accounts and still have time to do actual work (or shittalk on voice comms).
Idk if it's a bad thing, maybe that's what makes the game special and players like it.

Well they were probably just thinking more along the lines of payment and management convince. It would be nice to just have one bill and one login for all my characters but forcing it on people is wrong.

If only the entire engine didn't change like 5 times in the decade I am here..